SMASHING PUMPKINS SET OUT TO SMASH THEIR SOUND
The Greenville News
June 1996
Thanks to katie straker
We've been hearing the complaints for months. Alternative rock has grown tired, derivative, whiny and manipulative. It's a haven for unimaginative guitar-grinders and copycat lyricists. What started as an unrefined emotional vent has become a carefully crafted commercial commodity.
Billy Corgan, one of its most adroit song writers and a constant target of ridicule, is doing something about it.
At the close of their current tour, he and the other members of the Smashing Pumpkins intend to return to the drawing board. They're talking about completely tearing up the sound, investigating technology, losing the big guitars. Radical stuff.
NO CHOICE
To Corgan, there's no choice.
"At the beginning, alternative was speaking a real language,"
the 29-year-old Chicago native said before a recent show in this Detroit
suburb. "It was the sound of sincerity and passion. That's been
co-opted. What was once so powerful has been squeezed out.
"If you're taking people's money and asking for their attention, there has to be something going back. So we decided we would do that all the time -- really perform and really give (it) all -- and that would be it. It's hard to consider leaving this, but if you're going to grow, you've got to be willing to let go of something that's given you so much."
Corgan is sitting in a candlelit room with tapestries on the walls and clove incense in the air. The band calls it "the dark room" and it's one of the two specially decorated areas backstage. (The other, "the light room", is outfitted with a huge video-game rig and a massive table of food.)
It's hard to imagine Corgan and the other Pumpkins -- guitarist James Iha, bassist D'Arcy and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin -- letting go of their plush existence. Corgan has become the very symbol of alt-rock excess, a lightening rod for scorn and blame. His haughty pronouncments and bratty singing style are the artistic equivalent of a kick-me sign:
Anyone looking to trash alternative music can find a ready target in Corgan, who is portrayed in the press as humorless and self-obsessed.
Corgan's response: "We're not beautiful, we're not enigmatic, but every year we get bigger. I read the press, and they say we're the anti-christ. And I see people going crazy everytime we play. There's a disparity there."
When he and his co-horts scout for their next sound, says Corgan, they have no idea what they'll find.
He's enthusiastic about exploring keyboard technology and sampling, the tools of "pastiche artists" like Beck, who he believes is doing some of the most interesting work in pop.
In truth, it doesn't much matter where they end up: What counts is that they're going at all. Few successful acts are willing to undertake the total transformation Corgan envisions -- certainly none that came to prominence inthe alternaville '90s.
POSITION OF POWER
And fewer still start from the Pumpkins' position of power. The
band has sold over six million copies of "Mellon Collie and the Infinite
Sadness," the double CD released to critical acclaim last fall, and is
one of a handful of alternative groups to blossom into an arena draw.
From a businesss standpoint, there's no earthly reason to change a
thing.
Which is precisely why contrarian Corgan is initiating the change.
"We've pretty much maxed out the band we formed eight years ago. The double album has accomplished what I hoped it would: People can't just write us off anymore. ... If people don't respect us now, they never will."
"Mellon Collie" is something of a benchmark: It's got lush ballads dusted with orchestral strings, and moments of brutal, pulverizing guitar.
It's got the most mosh-friendly stuff assosicated with the early '90s Pumpkins and a slew of grabby, passionate pop songs that have little connection to grunge. Most ponder the meaning of loneliness: "Zero" culminates with Corgan's shouted declaration that "Emptiness is lonelinesss and loneliness is cleanliness and cleanliness is godliness and god is empty, just like me."
The album reflects the Pumpkins' journey from aggressive, full-throttle noise band to more subtle exponents of a variety of post-punk styles.
When the band started, Corgan recalls, it's musical rescouces were limited: "Power was greater than anything we could accomplish early on. It was like, 'If we play heavy, people will feel heavy'."
As his songwriting progressed, Corgan discovered he'd underestimated his melodic skills. He had always generated riffs and guitar lines that grabbed people, but he never bothered to do the same with his vocals.
The critical reacion to the Pumpkins' 1993 release "Siamese Dream" changed that.
"People were saying they didn't really hear songs," Corgan says, still stung by the criticism. "So the Mickey Rooney part if me kicked in. You know, 'They said I couldn't write pop songs!' So I went out and wrote pop songs ... the '90s version of Tin Pan Alley songs."
PERCEPTION OF SADNESS
Though Corgan's music became more accessible, the public
perception of him was still as a dour loner, a rock mope for whom
sadness was the only muse.
"People read way too much into Billy's lyrics," says drummer Chamberlin. "They're usually surprised when they meet him. He's not sad at all. He's a normal guy, tells jokes, hangs out. The music is only part of his personality."
Corgan points out "Mellon Collie's" "Muzzle" as a joke at his expense. "It was one of the last things I wrote for the album," he recalls. "And by that time, I was really aware of the repetition in terms of theme. ... So when I wrote the lyrics of 'Muzzle', I was thinking, 'People were going to tell me to shut up. Might as well have fun with it myself.'"
OPENNESS
A similar openness now informs the band's stage show.
In the past, the Pumpkins were one diffident bunch, blasting
through song after noisy song, creating a swirling mosh pit that
sometimes careened out of control.
"We didn't caer about who showed up or what they did," Corgan says. "Now, we want people to have a good time. We're more inclusive. It's like we used to wait to see how people responded to us. NOw, we're putting our hand out first, and if the audience puts their's out, everybody has a good time. That's really our whole attitude now: We live in a take-it-for-granted-world, and we're just saying we won't be taken for granted."